Jake Okechukwu Effoduh is a Vanier Scholar at the Osgoode Hall Law School, conducting doctorate research on the Legitimization of Artificial Intelligence in Africa. He is also a Queen Elizabeth Advanced Scholar with the Open Africa Innovation Research (OpenAIR), and a Partner at Praxis & Gnosis Law in Nigeria. He founded Law2Go in 2018, a digital library of human rights laws and legal services for Nigeria and he has been a human rights lawyer since 2011. With a demonstrated history of advocacy across domestic and international systems, Effoduh has worked within the justice sector in Nigeria, the West African ECOWAS human rights system, the African Human Rights Commission, and the UN Human Rights Council.

Effoduh anchored two nation-wide radio programmes in Nigeria for 12 years, which aired on over 150 stations and earned him several international awards including winning the Future Awards Africa for Community Action, and the prestigious African Broadcaster of the year Award in 2016. He has gained programmatic, research and academic experiences from working across 21 African countries and serves on the board of several NGOs including being a governing board member of a West African human rights fund operating in 12 countries.

He is a Climate Reality Leader and Mentor trained by Former US Vice President, Al Gore. He is also a Global Shaper from the Abuja Hub in Nigeria and serves on the Equity and Inclusion Steering Committee of the Global Shapers Community. He is listed as a World Economic Forum Expert on Human Rights and is currently on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Frontier Risks.

Effoduh has held Fellowships at the Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, Mandela School of Governance (South Africa), and the Pan-African Lawyers Union (Tanzania). He served as an International Law Scholar with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (Canada,) a Distinguished Hubert Humphrey Alum (U.S. Department of State, 2016), and a Distinguished Dutch Visitors Alum (Netherlands, 2016). He has delivered lectures at the University of Abuja in Nigeria, Ontario Tech University in Canada, University of Oxford in the UK, and York University. He holds 2 master’s degrees in law from the University of Oxford and the Osgoode Hall Law School respectively.